Twitter in Academic Conferences:

Usage, Networking and Participation over Time

Xidao Wen, University of PittsburghYu-Ru Lin, University of PittsburghChristoph Trattner, Know-Center*Denis Parra, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

ACM International Conferencia on Hypertext and Social Media, Santiago, 2014

*Presenter

Outline

• Context & Motivation of this research• Research Questions• Question 1: Communication Types Over Time• Question 2: Network Evolution over Time• Question 3: Predicting Re-visiting over Time• Conclusions and Future Work

Context

• An approach to Social Computing Research that I heard in a talk by Bob Kraut to study online social communities*

*(More Precisely, what I recall from that talk)

Robert KrautCarnegie Mellon University

Context

• An approach to Social Computing Research that I heard in a talk by Bob Kraut to study online social communities

Understand Communities

(behavior)

1st Step

Context

• An approach to Social Computing Research that I heard in a talk by Bob Kraut to study online social communities

Understand Communities

(behavior)

1st Step

Modify/EnhanceCommunities

Behavior

2nd Step

In this work, we study Twitter at Conferences• … and study what conference attendees are currently using, and how that

usage has evolved over time: Twitter

• How groups of people interact with each other on Twitter during academic conferences, In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2014), ACM, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Understand Communities

(behavior)

Many studies doing similar small-sized analysis• C. Ross, M. Terras, C. Warwick, and A. Welsh, “Enabled backchannel:

conference twitter use by digital humanists,” Journal of Documentation, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 214–237, 2011.• W. Reinhardt, M. Ebner, G. Beham, and C. Costa, “How people are using

twitter during conferences,” Creativity and innovation Competencies on the Web, p. 145, 2009.• M. Ebner, “Introducing live microblogging: How single presentations can be

enhanced by the mass.,” Journal of research in innovative teaching, vol. 2, no. 1, 2009.• J. Letierce, A. Passant, J. G. Breslin, and S. Decker, “Using twitter during an

academic conference: The# iswc2009 use-case.,” in ICWSM, 2010.

Many studies doing similar small-sized analysis• C. Ross, M. Terras, C. Warwick, and A. Welsh, “Enabled backchannel:

conference twitter use by digital humanists,” Journal of Documentation, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 214–237, 2011.• W. Reinhardt, M. Ebner, G. Beham, and C. Costa, “How people are using

twitter during conferences,” Creativity and innovation Competencies on the Web, p. 145, 2009.• M. Ebner, “Introducing live microblogging: How single presentations can be

enhanced by the mass.,” Journal of research in innovative teaching, vol. 2, no. 1, 2009.• J. Letierce, A. Passant, J. G. Breslin, and S. Decker, “Using twitter during an

academic conference: The# iswc2009 use-case.,” in ICWSM, 2010.

1. All of these works consider only a few

conferences in specific domains.

2. None of them have studied them over time

This Paper: Twitter in Conferences over Time• 16 conferences over 5 years in CS & IS

This Paper: Twitter in Conferences over Time

This Paper: Twitter in Conferences over Time• RQ1: Do users use Twitter more for socializing with peers or

for information sharing during conferences? How has such use of Twitter during conferences changed over the years?• RQ2: What are the structures of conversation and

information sharing networks in individual conferences? Have these network structures changed over time?• RQ3: Do users participate on Twitter for the same conference

over consecutive years? To what extent can we predict users’ future conference participation?

This Paper: Twitter in Conferences over Time• RQ1: Do users use Twitter more for socializing with peers or

for information sharing during conferences? How has such use of Twitter during conferences changed over the years?• RQ2: What are the structures of conversation and

information sharing networks in individual conferences? Have these network structures changed over time?• RQ3: Do users participate on Twitter for the same conference

over consecutive years? To what extent can we predict users’ future conference participation?

Types of communication over time

This Paper: Twitter in Conferences over Time• RQ1: Do users use Twitter more for socializing with peers or

for information sharing during conferences? How has such use of Twitter during conferences changed over the years?• RQ2: What are the structures of conversation and

information sharing networks in individual conferences? Have these network structures changed over time?• RQ3: Do users participate on Twitter for the same conference

over consecutive years? To what extent can we predict users’ future conference participation?

Network changes over time

This Paper: Twitter in Conferences over Time• RQ1: Do users use Twitter more for socializing with peers or

for information sharing during conferences? How has such use of Twitter during conferences changed over the years?• RQ2: What are the structures of conversation and

information sharing networks in individual conferences? Have these network structures changed over time?• RQ3: Do users participate on Twitter for the same conference

over consecutive years? To what extent can we predict users’ future conference participation?

Prediction of User Participation

RQ1: Types of Conversation over Time

Conference Tweets (line) vs.Random Sample (dashed)

RQ1: Types of Conversation over Time

Conference Tweets:- RT and URLs increase over time

RQ2: Network Changes over Time

Conversation Network: Mentions & Repliesvs Retweet Network

RQ2: Network Changes over Time

RQ2: Network Changes over Time Weakly Connected Components:

RT network stays the same over time.

Conversation network: get more scattered.

RQ3: Prediction of User Participation• Can we tell whether someone will return the coming year to the

conference based on her participation?AUC Results

Baseline: Number of tweets in the User Timeline (with + without hashtag during the conference weeks)

Your activity over the conference week is a good baseline predictor

RQ3: Prediction of User Participation• Can we tell whether someone will return the coming year to the

conference based on her participation?AUC Results

Baseline: Number of tweets in the User Timeline (with + without hashtag during the conference weeks)

Only #hashtagged tweets doesn’t help much

RQ3: Prediction of User Participation• Can we tell whether someone will return the coming year to the

conference based on her participation?AUC Results

Baseline: Number of tweets in the User Timeline (with + without hashtag during the conference weeks)

If you get retweeted by many people, or by important people

Conclusions & Future Work

• Usage of Twitter in Conferences has increase over time and has changed considerable: people are more likely to RT and share URLs than to “talk” (replies and mentions) by Twitter• Over time, the conversations get more scattered, but not the

“advertisement” or “resource sharing” of the RT network• Total Twitter activity over the conference week helps to predict

returning to the conference, not only #hashtagged Twitter activity.• CURRENT EXTENSION: use content-based features, sentiment

analysis, consider hypotheses of “communities of practice”

Limitations

• The analyses only considered types of messages (re-tweets, mentions, URLs) and social network analysis’ metrics.• Obtaining a representative sample of Twitter is a problem not solve

(at least for researchers in academia that can use only the Twitter API, or other 3rd party APIs such as Topsy)• We are covering a sample of conferences in the domain of Computer

and Information Science.

A little spoiler…Subjectivity: Does this message have an opinion is rather a fact?

“I think this is a nice talk” (subjective ++)

There are 10 people in this room ( subjective-- )

A little spoiler… #ht2014?

#ht2014 ?

Polarity

HT

Thanks!

• And don’t forget today the social event (is included with the conference registration) at • Hotel Plaza San Francisco, 8:30pm

… but then, I decided to give a step back• Our first attempt was studying 4 conference-communities (Wen,

Parra, Trattner at CSCW 2014) and see how groups of conference attendees communicate on Twitter• Faculty / Senior research students / Junior research students• Others

• We expected to have an important participation from newcomers to the conferences.

How this Research Started

• It started by creating a tool, Conference Navigator, in order to support conference attendees

• Conference Navigator provides a ranking of top bookmarked talks, recommendation of talks, “People who bookmarked this, also bookmarked …”

Modify/EnhanceCommunities

Behavior

… but then, I decided to give a step back• Our first attempt was studying 4 conference-communities (Wen,

Parra, Trattner at CSCW 2014) and see how groups of conference attendees communicate on Twitter• Faculty / Senior research students / Junior research students• Others

• We expected to have an important participation from newcomers during the conferences.

We found out that Twitter might not be always the best entrance for newcomers in a research community.

Random Sampling

• Use of TOPSY API: Search for a –or- b –or- …. –z-• Pick 2/3 of the hours in a year (24 x 365)• Per each hour sampled, pick randomly 2 minutes• As a result, there will be a lot of tweets in several pages. Pick randomly

a result page• Total tweets sampled: ~ 5.8 million tweets (2009 -2013)• Distribution of RT, replies, URLs is not significantly different than D.

Boyd, S. Golder, and G. Lotan, “Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of retweeting on twitter,” in System Sciences (HICSS), 2010 43rd Hawaii InternationalConference on, pp. 1–10, IEEE, 2010.